You Never Forget Your First Time!

Thanks to Amanda McCabe and Megan Frampton for giving me the idea for today's post. I'm running on low steam right now, since I haven't had any caffeine today. Damn period! Caffeine gives me the worst cramps, but I have a hard time functioning without it, and I only have a small cup a day.

Anyway, I loved Victoria Holt growing up. She was one of the first romance novelists that I ever read in my early teens before I discovered Woodiwiss and Small. I loved her gothic tales of mysterious mansions, and handsome alpha males who may or may not want to kill the heroine.

In her books, I got to travel to exotic places like Australia, and Africa, not to mention Cornwall and India. I think her books were the first ones that I read that were in the first person.

She wrote books under two other pseudonyms besides Victoria Holt. Straight historical fiction about the English and French royal families as Jean Plaidy, and as Phillipa Carr she wrote a series tracing one family from the Elizabethan period to the late nineteenth century before she died. I devoured every series. Thanks to Eleanor Hibbert (her real name), I developed a love for English history (particularly the Plantagenets), and the French that lasts to this day.

When I read Evelyn Vaughn's first book of the Grail Keepers series, I knew the myth of Melusine because I'd read about King John's widow Isabelle and her marriage to Hugh de Lusignan in a Jean Plaidy novel (she'd written the entire history of the English royal family up to Queen Victoria, with a side-trip to Mary, Queen of Scots).

Mistress of Mellyn, if you can find it, is one of her best books. Martha Leigh is a prim and freshly minted governess who has been hired by the remote and demanding Connan TreMellyn to care for his daughter Alvean. As the departure of the three prior governesses suggests, Alvean is a difficult charge, though understandably so since the recent death of her mother, Alice. As Martha tries to connect with Alvean, she researches the history of Mellyn, and discovers hidden family secrets that still haunt the present. Now familiar with Alvean, she feels herself falling for Connan. Though the desire between Martha and Connan grows, Alice's tragic death continues to haunt them both and endanger any future they may have.

A delightful combination of Rebecca and Jane Eyre. I can easily imagine it as a movie with James Purefoy and Tara Fitzgerald.

If you've never read Victoria Holt, this is the one to start with.

What was your first time?